Adam J. Kolber
Professor of Law
Professor Kolber writes and teaches in the areas of criminal law, bioethics, and neuroethics. He is an associate editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Neuroethics, and the founder of the “Neuroethics & Law Blog.” He has taught law and neuroscience topics to federal and state judges as part of a MacArthur Foundation grant. Professor Kolber has been frequently quoted in the media, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Science, and Wired. In 2007-2008, he was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at Princeton University where he wrote about the theory of punishment and how advances in our understanding of the mind and brain ought to inform our punishment practices.
Before joining the faculty at the University of San Diego, he clerked for the Honorable Chester J. Straub of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practiced law with Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York. He graduated Order of the Coif from Stanford Law School, where he was an associate editor of the Stanford Law Review. Prior to law school, he was a business ethics consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Among his recent publications, Professor Kolber has written "The Subjective Experience of Punishment," 109 Columbia Law Review 182 (2009); "Therapeutic Forgetting: The Legal and Ethical Implications of Memory Dampening," 59 Vanderbilt Law Review 1561 (2006); "A Limited Defense of Clinical Placebo Deception," 26 Yale Law & Policy Review 75 (2007); and "Pain Detection and the Privacy of Subjective Experience," 33 American Journal of Law & Medicine 433 (2007).
